Andrés
Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a
decade. He tells his story for the first time.
PART 5
In 2012,
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s successor,
unexpectedly restarted peace talks with the FARC, hoping to end a
50-year war. Furious, Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC
guerrillas, created a party and backed an alternative candidate,
Oscar Iván Zuluaga, who opposed the talks.
Rendón, who
was working for Santos, wanted Sepúlveda to join his team, but
Sepúlveda turned him down. He considered Rendón’s willingness to
work for a candidate supporting peace with the FARC a betrayal and
suspected the consultant was going soft, choosing money over
principles. Sepúlveda says he was motivated by ideology first and
money second, and that if he wanted to get rich he could have made a
lot more hacking financial systems than elections. For the first
time, he decided to oppose his mentor.
Sepúlveda
went to work for the opposition, reporting directly to Zuluaga’s
campaign manager, Luis Alfonso Hoyos. (Zuluaga denies any knowledge
of hacking; Hoyos couldn’t be reached for comment.) Together,
Sepúlveda says, they came up with a plan to discredit the president
by showing that the guerrillas continued to traffic in drugs and
violence even as they talked about peace. Within months, Sepúlveda
hacked the phones and e-mail accounts of more than 100 militants,
including the FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño, also known as
Timochenko. After assembling a thick file on the FARC, including
evidence of the group’s suppression of peasant votes in the
countryside, Sepúlveda agreed to accompany Hoyos to the offices of a
Bogotá TV news program and present the evidence.
It may not
have been wise to work so doggedly and publicly against a party in
power. A month later, Sepúlveda was smoking on the terrace of his
Bogotá office when he saw a caravan of police vehicles pull up.
Forty black-clad commandos raided the office to arrest him. Sepúlveda
blamed his carelessness at the TV station for the arrest. He believes
someone there turned him in. In court, he wore a bulletproof vest and
sat surrounded by guards with bomb shields. In the back of the
courtroom, men held up pictures of his family, making a slashing
gesture across their throats or holding a hand over their mouths—stay
silent or else. Abandoned by former allies, he eventually pleaded
guilty to espionage, hacking, and other crimes in exchange for a
10-year sentence.
Three days
after arriving at Bogotá’s La Picota prison, he went to the
dentist and was ambushed by men with knives and razors, but was saved
by guards. A week later, guards woke him and rushed him from his
cell, saying they had heard about a plot to shoot him with a silenced
pistol as he slept. After national police intercepted phone calls
revealing yet another plot, he’s now in solitary confinement at a
maximum-security facility in a rundown area of central Bogotá. He
sleeps with a bulletproof blanket and vest at his bedside, behind
bombproof doors. Guards check on him every hour. As part of his plea
deal, he says, he’s turned government witness, helping
investigators assess possible cases against the former candidate,
Zuluaga, and his strategist, Hoyos. Authorities issued an indictment
for the arrest of Hoyos, but according to Colombian press reports
he’s fled to Miami.
When
Sepúlveda leaves for meetings with prosecutors at the Bunker, the
attorney general’s Bogotá headquarters, he travels in an armed
caravan including six motorcycles speeding through the capital at 60
mph, jamming cell phone signals as they go to block tracking of his
movements or detonation of roadside bombs.
In July
2015, Sepúlveda sat in the small courtyard of the Bunker, poured
himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and took out a pack of
Marlboro cigarettes. He says he wants to tell his story because the
public doesn’t grasp the power hackers exert over modern elections
or the specialized skills needed to stop them. “I worked with
presidents, public figures with great power, and did many things with
absolutely no regrets because I did it with full conviction and under
a clear objective, to end dictatorship and socialist governments in
Latin America,” he says. “I have always said that there
are two types of politics—what people see and what really makes
things happen. I worked in politics that are not seen.”
Sepúlveda
says he’s allowed a computer and a monitored Internet connection as
part of an agreement to help the attorney general’s office track
and disrupt drug cartels using a version of his Social Media Predator
software. The government will not confirm or deny that he has access
to a computer, or what he’s using it for. He says he has modified
Social Media Predator to counteract the kind of sabotage he used to
specialize in, including jamming candidates’ Facebook walls and
Twitter feeds. He’s used it to scan 700,000 tweets from pro-Islamic
State accounts to learn what makes a good terror recruiter. Sepúlveda
says the program has been able to identify ISIS recruiters minutes
after they create Twitter accounts and start posting, and he hopes to
share the information with the U.S. or other countries fighting the
Islamist group. Samples of Sepúlveda’s code evaluated by an
independent company found it authentic and substantially original.
Sepúlveda’s
contention that operations like his happen on every continent is
plausible, says David Maynor, who runs a security testing company in
Atlanta called Errata Security. Maynor says he occasionally gets
inquiries for campaign-related jobs. His company has been asked to
obtain e-mails and other documents from candidates’ computers and
phones, though the ultimate client is never disclosed. “Those
activities do happen in the U.S., and they happen all the time,” he
says.
In one case,
Maynor was asked to steal data as a security test, but the individual
couldn’t show an actual connection to the campaign whose security
he wanted to test. In another, a potential client asked for a
detailed briefing on how a candidate’s movements could be tracked
by switching out the user’s iPhone for a bugged clone. “For
obvious reasons, we always turned them down,” says Maynor, who
declines to name the candidates involved.
Three weeks
before Sepúlveda’s arrest, Rendón was forced to resign from
Santos’s campaign amid allegations in the press that he took $12
million from drug traffickers and passed part of it on to the
candidate, something he denies.
According to
Rendón, Colombian officials interviewed him shortly afterward in
Miami, where he keeps a home. Rendón says that Colombian
investigators asked him about Sepúlveda and that he told them
Sepúlveda’s role was limited to Web development.
Rendón
denies working with Sepúlveda in any meaningful capacity. “He
says he worked with me in 20 places, and the truth is he didn’t,”
Rendón says. “I never paid Andrés Sepúlveda a peso.”
Last year,
based on anonymous sources, the Colombian media reported that Rendón
was working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Rendón calls
the reports untrue. The campaign did approach him, he says, but he
turned them down because he dislikes Trump. “To my knowledge we
are not familiar with this individual,” says Trump’s
spokeswoman, Hope Hicks. “I have never heard of him, and the
same goes for other senior staff members.” But Rendón says
he’s in talks with another leading U.S. presidential campaign—he
wouldn’t say which—to begin working for it once the primaries
wrap up and the general election begins.
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